Joshua Glenn, a Boston-based writer, publisher, and semiotician. He is co-author of Significant Objects, published by Fantagraphics this month, and Unbored, the kids’ field guide to serious fun coming from Bloomsbury this fall. He edits the website HiLobrow, which as HiLoBooks is now publishing classics -- by Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others -- from what he calls science fiction’s Radium Age.

In this episode:

Significant Objects. A book that "collects the results of a literary experiment in which a best-selling or popular author wrote a short fictional prose story about an object on eBay, raising its value; the profit from the object’s sale then went to charity."

Joshua Glenn's science fiction picks for kids. "Science fiction frees our imagination from an enchantment, cast upon it by everyday life, which would encourage us to believe that the way things are is natural, permanent, and inevitable. Much of the media to which kids are exposed blunts their critical reasoning skills; but science fiction gives those skills a good workout. Matthew Looney's Invasion of the Earth." Heinlein’s Red Planet (1949), Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams’s Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine (1958), John Christopher’s Tripods Trilogy (1967-68), Jack Kirby’s Kamandi (1972-78), Madeleine L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), Monica Hughes’ Isis Trilogy (1980-82).

Creepy Presents Richard Corben. "Horror comics visionary and coloring pioneer Richard Corben has been a voice of creativity and change for over four decades. For the first time ever, Corben's legendary Creepy and Eerie short stories and cover illustrations are being collected into one deluxe hardcover."

Dal Tokyo. Gary Panter began imagining Dal Tokyo, a future Mars that is terraformed by Texan and Japanese workers, as far back as 1972.

I used to love the Danny Dunn books as a kid, but they’re almost unfindable now. I have never seen one in a used book store, and the few times I’ve done searches for used copies online the prices have been exorbitant.

YESSS, Danny Dunn was my childhood hero. I used to keep track of the stuff in my pockets, and imagine what wild uses Danny might be able to put them to use. And the books were so gosh darned prescient (I’m looking at you, invisible boy!!

I read quite a few Danny Dunn books as a kid, but I found them annoying for a really nerdy reason.

They often had SF-ish themes, like rockets to the moon and contacting alien life (really! Danny and SETI message). But they were mostly spy and action stories. The cool Macguffin was almost incidental. Like: They revcieve and decode the message from space, and it depicts an alien ship flying to Earth. The End. The rocket to the moon is simply a high speed missing which creates a cloud of dust on the moon. Hey, we reached the moon! The End.

I was starting to read other YA books in which dramatic stuff with lasting implications happened. Actual space missions. (If only to invisible moon inhabited by mushroom people.) Terrifying alien invaders to stuck mind control caps on you.

That’s one of the things that I actually like(d) about them, both as a kid and as an adult–cool technology, but also with some sharp observations about how the tech could be used and misused. In the “Invisible Boy” adventure mentioned above, [SPOILERS] Danny doesn’t really turn invisible, but gains access to an insect-sized drone that he can use to spy on people… only a member of the military wants to use it to spy as well, not only on foreign agents but also Americans. Sound familiar? And his adventure in a world’s-fair-type House of the Future turns into a nightmare when he and his friends are trapped in it, the very picture of technology that you can’t access, modify or control taking control over your life instead. Pretty dramatic stuff, and with lasting implications that are still with us. If you want your space opera, you can still read some of Heinlein’s juvenile adventures from before he started taking himself a little too seriously.